Here are some guidelines for posting News Articles in the Current Affairs section:

9) Any insulting or denigrating references to Racial/National/Genetic groups will be removed (please report them as your normally would). But insults directed at political or ideological groups will be more leniently evaluated and are generally classed as free speech. Please understand this distinction. References to religious groups will be evaluated when reported but are generally frowned upon as incitement.

A reminder to all members posting in this sub-forum...

Over the last few months some folks seem to have forgotten about the posting guidelines resulting in a slide towards a News24-type of comments' section.

I'm slightly unhappy with how thats been implemented.
I think you should be pm'ing people that have had posts deleted by yourself and letting them know, rather than arbitrarily removing things, as a common courtesy at least. I do this in my own forums when necessary.

As an example, you deleted a comment I made in one of the (quite contentious Palestinian / Israeli threads) where I stated I didn't see the issue with what they had done, and we should be doing the same thing here (regarding Israeli's shooting a demonstrator throwing rocks and burning things in the leg and arresting them). It was not racist, nor was it against posting guidelines. I wasn't notified that you had removed my comment, or several others in that thread that you removed. I see that the specific thread has been removed in its entirety now.

While I can obviously appreciate that times are sensitive now, and the ANC is going to be going after anything that sniff's of racism to further their cause, I think the implementation could be thought out in a better way.

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While this is not particularly relevant to the posting guidelines thread, I'm at a loss of where to put this, as the Racism thread is locked. If you need to move this or delete, please consider informing me first.

Additionally - What happened to the thread report tools? I remember being able to report threads previously to moderators (usually for spam purposes, but occasionally for other reasons).

I'm slightly unhappy with how thats been implemented.
I think you should be pm'ing people that have had posts deleted by yourself and letting them know, rather than arbitrarily removing things, as a common courtesy at least. I do this in my own forums when necessary.

As an example, you deleted a comment I made in one of the (quite contentious Palestinian / Israeli threads) where I stated I didn't see the issue with what they had done, and we should be doing the same thing here (regarding Israeli's shooting a demonstrator throwing rocks and burning things in the leg and arresting them). It was not racist, nor was it against posting guidelines. I wasn't notified that you had removed my comment, or several others in that thread that you removed. I see that the specific thread has been removed in its entirety now.

While I can obviously appreciate that times are sensitive now, and the ANC is going to be going after anything that sniff's of racism to further their cause, I think the implementation could be thought out in a better way.

We are not implementing anything new, merely reinforcing the current guidelines.

All the mods are volunteers and do this in our spare time. Sorry, but I seriously don't have the time to PM every user for every post that gets deleted. What we can do is issue warnings with every deleted post...

A couple of days back 3 new threads were created regards the same news item - all 3 created by mybb staff.
This is a frequent event.

I'm curious as to how this happens - do staff simply post not looking to see if the thread (sometimes already pages long) already exists

How can this be prevented ?

I think if rpm would allow it, maybe MickeyD and I could post a link to the main thread and then close those other duplicate threads.
I know rpm doesn't like them to be merged because it sometimes breaks the links to the front page articles (for people who are coming in to comment).
That way the new threads would remain, but point to the thread where the discussion is taking place.

4) Please post your own comments and opinions in a separate post AFTER the article. Rather keep the News Article in its own post. Also try to avoid re-quoting very long articles if you are only adding one line of comment. Please do not edit or highlight the source article. Rather quote the article in a separate post.